Tea Cups, Cameras and Family Life: Picturing Domesticity in Elite European and Javanese Family Photographs from the Netherlands Indies, ca. 1900–42

Abstract

This article examines the representation of tea drinking in photographs and the commemoration of this pastime in European and Javanese family photograph albums, in the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia) during the early twentieth century. As ego documents (autobiographical sources), family photographs of tea-time reveal how the expression of social categories like race, class and gender were choreographed in the home by colonial family members for their own viewing. As sources for social history, such photographs reflect not just on markers of social differentiation, but also on familial cohesion and, importantly, on an emerging class solidarity between Javanese and Europeans that transcended racial distinctions. Worldliness, domesticity and a peculiar mode of civility that would in the European context have been considered middle class, but in the Indies were considered elite, were the normative cultural standards by which the photogenicity of the colonial family was measured in photographs of tea drinking. Tea cups and cameras were thus wielded by amateur family photographers to reproduce both the hierarchy and unity that simultaneously divided and connected sectors of elite colonial society in the early twentieth century. Parts of this essay were first delivered as a paper at the conference Facing Asia: Histories and Legacies of Asian Studio Photography, convened by Luke Gartlan and Gael Newton in Canberra, Australia, 21–22 August 2010. Research for this essay was funded by a University of Western Australia Research Development Award in 2009 and by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2010. Many thanks to Dr Cecilia Leong-Salobir for her work as a Research Assistant on this project in 2009. For images and permissions, I am grateful to Liesbeth Ouwehand and Reinder Storm in Special Collections at the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV), Leiden, as well as to Lee Grant, Gael Newton and Nick Nicholson at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra. Finally, thanks to the anonymous reviewer of my article, as well as Jane Drakard, Bain Attwood, Alistair Thomson and Ian Copland at Monash University, for their comments and suggestions on improving this essay.Email for correspondence: susanne.protschky@monash.edu